+1 for being able to tag individual photos. I can easily imagine looking for, say, all photos containing signatures for which tagging seems like an obvious approach.
PS “Consolidation” gets me every time. Is it more than just a reload and update of a photo? I can imagine some process going on in the background that might be called consolidation, but from the user perspective, it doesn’t seem like that.
Yes, tagging photos and selections is definitely on our roadmap. There’s no one working on it currently, but it’s something we want to address after managed projects and syncing.
The term consolidation was originally used because it was about checking the entire library and consolidating its state with changes that happened outside of Tropy. Applied to individual photos it’s arguably a bit misleading, you’re right.
Thank you for your reply! I’ll keep an eye out for that update.
Using Tropy 1.9.0
I have exactly the same requirement, to be able to tag individual photos. I don’t understand why Tropy offers “add tag” at the photo-level, but then doesn’t let you get back to the photo using that tag. If only items can be tagged, then only items should offer “add tag”.
I have many reasons to want photo-level tagging. But the must urgent for me right now is to be able to rapidly return to a particular image that I’m working with during international seminar meetings over Zoom that I have twice a week. We are editing, moving through three MSS, and I keep having to fumble about to re-find the MS folio we worked on last session. Tropy returns to the top of the photo list each time its opened, and I have MSS with 300 ff. It’s an annoying waste of time every session. Why can’t I bookmark a folio? Why can’t I return to the Tropy display I last used?
Am I failing to understand something about how Tropy works?
Tropy currently offers no ‘add tag’ at the photo level, I think that’s a misunderstanding? Tags are applied only on the item level. The reason for this is that the search parameteers (consisting of either search query, selected list and tags) operates at the item level. The UI is not (yet) designed to offer a good way to search within items – this is a shortcoming we want to address in the future, especially to support items with hundreds of photos like yours.
To address one pressing issue, we should look into remembering the most recently selected photo within an item and re-select it when you activate the item the next time. That’s a good point! I’ll open an issue thread to track this on GitHub.
I don’t know if it is feasible in your case, but if you find you have many large items with hundreds of photos that all require separate metadata or notes, you could split that item into several items if applicable. For example, instead of a single item corresponding to a book, you could have a list with several items corresponding to chapters. Or even a list corresponding to the book, nested lists corresponding to chapters, then items corresponding to sections.
Tropy has three levels of granularity for metadata and notes: item, photo, selection; selections are linked to a photo; photos can be grouped in items; items can be grouped in lists and tags; lists can be nested. Search results are currently limited to items and there is no way to search inside a given item, therefore the UI works best if you keep the number of important photos in an item relatively low.
Thank you so much for attending to this. Returning to the state of a previous session would already be a great help!
As for not tagging photos, I see now that the “tag item” button beside the photo refers not to the photo but to Tropy’s special meaning for the word “item.” It is a little confusing, I have to say.
Believe me that it was quite a journey before we settled on the name ‘item’! It’s almost definitely going to stay now, but I’m always curious to hear other ideas or suggestions if you have any. The fundamental idea behind Tropy is that it is built with as little assumptions about its main ‘items’ of interest as possible. An item is a thing or concept of which you have one or more photos and that you describe using arbitrary metadata fields.
Since it’s been over a year, I wanted to check back if there has been any development to make tagging photos and selections possible? Or if there will be in the near future.
Thanks for the update!
We’re currently working on features which might potentially attaching tags at different levels, so it will be very helpful if you could post your usage scenarios. That is, which problems are you trying to solve and how would you expect to use tags at different levels.
Our current approach is based on the premise that we’d like to make working with large items easier. One of the ideas to achieve this is that everything below the item level can be filtered (i.e., only show photos and notes which match certain criteria). If we do this, tags at specific levels will be helpful (i.e., show only certain tagged photos out of all the photos in an item).
It seems inevitable that an item will count as being tagged in a given way if one of its photos is so tagged. One question we had, therefore, was whether or not photo/selection/notes tags make item tags less useful. Anyway, as you can see, there’s still a lot to be done so all your examples and ideas are much appreciated.
Hello, checking in to see if any progress has been made on this. I work with documents that are quite long, so tagging selections within them (as opposed to tagging the whole item) is almost an essential feature. If this is not working at the moment, is there a workflow that you would recommend for this?
